[From an Energy Wire article by Emily Holden and Evan Lehmann, sub. req’d] …The final Clean Power Plan released yesterday didn’t include EPA’s plan to deal with obstinate states. That proposal is an additional 755 pages, much of which is devoted to the idea of carbon trading. EPA expects to complete it next year after accepting feedback from states and other parties.

Under the proposed federal implementation plan, or FIP, EPA would either assign a cap on emissions and allow for the trading of pollution credits or require a state to meet an average emissions rate across its electricity fleet. A rate-based standard with trading could technically allow emissions to grow, as long as generators only emit a certain amount of carbon per megawatt-hour of power produced. A state with a rate around the same level as a natural gas plant could theoretically keep building more and more natural gas plants and stay in compliance.

The agency plans to settle on one of the two strategies in a final federal plan in summer 2016…The federal plan would be directed at electricity generators, effectively bypassing states that refuse to implement carbon cuts…